


Interlude

by dynamic



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Fuckbuddies, HP: EWE, Hogwarts Eighth Year, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-04
Updated: 2016-11-04
Packaged: 2018-08-28 22:57:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8466178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dynamic/pseuds/dynamic
Summary: Harry doesn’t know how to be a stranger to Draco Malfoy.





	

Harry is wiping come off his stomach when Draco says, “We shouldn’t do this anymore.”

Harry halts, his wand gripped in his hand, the sheets draped carelessly over his ankles and not much else. Draco is sitting on the edge of the bed, facing away from Harry. There’s still a sheen of sweat on his back, as well as angry-looking pink lines where Harry had dug in, drunk with it. Harry swallows, once.

“Okay,” he says. His throat is dry.

Draco dresses himself quickly and leaves through the only door in the room, out into the seventh floor corridor.

*

“Harry, has something happened with Malfoy?” Hermione asks over breakfast the following week. Harry starts so badly that his spoonful of cereal misses his mouth entirely, splattering down the front of his robes instead. Ron snickers, but Hermione gives him a sympathetic look and cleans him off with a flick of her wand.

“Er, no, nothing’s happened. Why do you ask?” Harry tries his best to sound nonchalant, but it’s become increasingly difficult to hide his emotions from Hermione. It makes sense, he supposes, after spending half a year with her in a tent, but sometimes he wishes it weren’t so. Like right now.

“He’s just stopped being...well, Malfoy-ish to you. None of his usual insults and jabs and sneers. He hasn’t so much as looked at you in days, haven’t you noticed?”

Harry had noticed. He had noticed a lot.

“No,” he says. “Should I have?”

Hermione frowns. What’s more surprising, however, is that Ron frowns too.

“You’ve always been sort of attuned to Malfoy, mate,” Ron says. “Maybe not last year, but it picked right back up once school started again. You even spoke for him at his trials, I mean!”

Harry is the one who frowns this time. “Well, that’s because I don’t think he deserves to rot in Azkaban for things he was forced into. But the rest of it, that’s nothing. We haven’t spoken since school started.”

This is another lie, but he looks down into his now soggy cereal as he says it, hoping that preventing Hermione from seeing his eyes will make her believe it. She simply raises her eyebrows in a rather bemused way. Harry’s spoon makes sullen clinks against the sides of his bowl as he swims it idly through the discolored milk. He never was a good liar.

*

Draco makes the best sort of sounds when he’s in the moment, a high pitched sort of _oh, oh_ when he was about to come, or the whine in the back of his throat when Harry takes his cock into his mouth. Little things about him, details that Harry had noticed—like the way his fingers pressed inwards around Harry’s hips when they fucked, like the force of pressure behind those ten digits conveyed everything that his cock in Harry could not, and those eleven points of contact were always burning hot.

Harry thinks of those fingertips, even as they’re wrapped around the handle of a knife and are stained with purple juice as they carefully skin a shrivelfig. Slughorn, for whatever reason—probably the same reason Harry’s somehow still taking the godforsaken subject of Advanced Potions—had paired the two of them up today. Probably in the interest of whatever “inter-house unity” project that McGonagall had stirred up for that week. Harry’s hand tightens around his own knife. He and Draco had already been unified quite enough, and Draco had decided he didn’t want any of that anymore. 

Which is fine by Harry. He had been the one to stipulate that they could call the whole thing off whenever they wanted to, after all.

Malfoy’s arm is warm next to Harry’s. Have these workbenches always been so small? Or is Malfoy just purposefully crowding into his space? Harry stares at their cauldrons and cutting boards, both of which each take up perfectly half of the space at their work table.

Malfoy is slicing up his daisy roots now, with a careful precision. Quick cuts, clean through, leaving each piece perfectly identical in size to the others. Efficient.

Draco hadn’t been efficient while fucking. He liked to take his time, liked to push his fingers into Harry first, then his tongue. Sometimes he didn’t even put his cock in Harry. Sometimes he did and then he didn’t even move, just held it there, luxuriating in the position while Harry quivered beneath him.

Something cold and wet splatters all over Harry’s hand, and when he looks, it’s covered in purple juice. His shrivelfig, now deformed and deflated, is between his fingers that had clenched quite without his meaning to.

Some of the shrivelfig juice had splattered onto Malfoy’s work surface. He glances at it with what Harry thinks is contempt, but he can never really tell.

“Sorry,” Harry mutters, unclenching his hand and letting the shrivelfig drop. Malfoy just shrugs, indifferent.

*

Harry corners Draco after class.

He orchestrates the whole thing, discreetly spelling a split into the seam of Draco’s bag so that it rips open when picked up. Harry recalls doing something similar to Cedric Diggory in fourth year and feels vaguely guilty, but quickly pushes that thought aside and stows away his wand. Draco looks supremely annoyed, and Harry leaves the class with everyone else while he stays behind to gather his spilled things.

“No, you two go on, I want to—er—talk to Slughorn about something,” Harry says to Ron and Hermione, who shrug and make their way down the corridor. Slughorn, Harry knows, has been keen on avoiding talking with students after class since the beginning of the year, and retreats to his office the moment that class is over, so Harry and Draco will be essentially alone in the now-deserted corridor.

He pushes Draco up against the wall the moment Draco exits the class, the way Harry knows he likes it. He’s done it before, and then kissed down Draco’s neck, slid down on his knees and mouthed at Draco’s cock through his trousers until the other boy whined above him.

He doesn’t whine now; he snarls, shoving at Harry’s shoulders the first moment he gets.

“What do you think you’re doing, Potter?” he demands.

“Let’s meet again tonight,” Harry says, pressing closer into Draco’s space. “Please, let’s do it. I—I want you.”

He hesitates. He had been about to say, _I miss you._

Draco curls his hands into Harry’s robes at his shoulders for a moment, and his lips part, and those pale eyes look at him in that way Harry has grown to know, and Harry thinks he’s won—until he’s being shoved back once again, and those lips are curling into a sneer and those eyes grow cold again.

“I told you that we shouldn’t anymore,” he says, and then seems to think it necessary to add on, “I don’t want to anymore.”

“Just one last time,” Harry says. He knows he sounds pathetic and desperate.

“No,” Draco says, and this time he’s firm. “It’s not a good idea. You know it isn’t. It’s dangerous.”

Harry knows all of this. He knows all of this, but he doesn’t care. He says as much to Draco, who now looks enraged.

“You don’t care,” Draco hisses, rounding on Harry. His eyes are alight. “You don’t care! Well _I_ bloody do. I’m already bound for a pariah’s life after I leave here, and personally, I don’t think being outed as Harry Potter’s experimental _boytoy_ is going to do me any favours. You don’t _care_ , I’m so fucking glad that you can _afford_ not to care.”

“You’re worried what people will think?” Harry retorts, getting worked up as well. “You’re a fucking liar. You’re the one who convinced me in the first place, remember? You said, and I quote, ‘Fuck what everyone else is saying. This isn’t about what they want. It’s about what we want.’ Or do you not remember that? You’re a fucking coward.”

“What I wanted was a convenient fuck whenever I pleased,” Draco says without missing a beat, acid seeping into his every syllable. “However, it’s no longer _convenient_ for me. It was nothing more than just shagging in the first place, Potter. Just shagging. _You’re_ the one who said that before, or _do you not remember_?” His sneer is fifth year-worthy, and Harry, stung, has no sharp rebuttal.

“Fuck you, Malfoy,” he bites out instead, and then he spins on his heel and stomps away.

*

Pansy Parkinson, of all people, storms up to him after class one day. Harry is sure he’s about to be slapped across the face, but she just pins him with deadly glare.

“I don’t know what convoluted idea you have in your head, Potter,” she spits out, “but you had better quit it. Right now.”

Harry is still smarting from the other day’s argument with Malfoy, so he says, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Parkinson.”

“Yes you do,” she says levelly, and Harry has to admit he is a little bit impressed. Up close, her features look as puggish as ever, though not in an objectively unattractive way, he comes to realize.

“I don’t,” Harry maintains. “And if you didn’t already know, it has been quit.”

This seems to surprise Parkinson, for she draws away momentarily. Harry takes this opportunity to make his escape.

He becomes angry, later on, at the idea of Malfoy sending _Parkinson_ after him. The little bastard, couldn’t he even face Harry himself?

 _He did the other day when you cornered him,_ Harry’s conscience reminds him unhelpfully. And from the sound of it, Parkinson didn’t even know the full situation.

It didn’t matter anyway, he decides. He and Malfoy would just go back to the way they had been before everything.

Where was that, though? Before this year, before Malfoy’s trial, before the war, before all those years of mutual hatred, before they ever met?

He doesn’t know if he could take it, becoming strangers to each other. Harry doesn’t know how to be a stranger to Draco Malfoy.

*

The cordiality of it is what eats away at Harry.

He can’t stand it. Malfoy seems to have figured out that Harry can’t tolerate being totally ignored, but the stiff nod, the curt _“Potter”_ when they come across each other is just as bad. It was the strangest thing in the world, seeing Malfoy across the classroom or the Great Hall, doing things like taking notes or eating dinner or talking with Pansy Parkinson, all while knowing exactly what he looked like when he would come undone, or what he sounded like as he came. The juxtaposition of it all is bizarre and unsettling, in a way that it isn’t for people like Ginny.

Harry remembers the exact texture and softness of Ginny’s lips, the sweet scent of her hair, the freckles across her collarbones, everything—but only when he calls upon their memory. They don’t spring into his mind, unbidden, when he looks at her. They still talk. They still sit together sometimes, they are still friends, and it is fine. It is not fine when he looks at Malfoy and thinks of all those things. It is not fine when he’s not even _looking_ at Malfoy, and still thinks of all those things.

He’s never been friends with Draco Malfoy, he reminds himself. 

It had been just about shagging. That’s all.

*

McGonagall’s next attempt at inter-house unity is a quite brilliant. Intramural Quidditch, just recreationally, with the rule that there had to be at least one member of each House on each team.

Harry joins up with one of them immediately, as does Ron. Hermione even agrees to play a match or two, and the whole thing reminds Harry achingly of those summers spent at the Burrow, before the war had come and taken things like flying just for the fun of it away from them.

Privately, Harry’s anticipating playing against Malfoy again. He’s sure that Malfoy will show up, sure that he won’t miss an opportunity to show off and remind everyone that there was something he actually _was_ good at, something that deserved praise. And on the Quidditch pitch, they don’t have to be so cordial. They can be fiery and dynamic, no more of the subdued, curt _nodding_ to each other in hallways. Those nods make Harry furious.

Hermione notices, of course.

“Harry, you’re sure nothing’s happened with Malfoy?” she asks, almost perfunctorily, one day after such an occasion. Malfoy continues down the hallway talking with Blaise Zabini, not a backward glance spared. 

“Positive,” Harry says, and he doesn’t even believe it when it comes out of his own mouth. Hermione doesn’t pursue the subject further, though, for which Harry is grateful.

Malfoy doesn’t turn up for recreational Quidditch that weekend, nor the next. Harry, through much sifting through the Hogwarts gossip mill, finds out that he had intended to join up when the idea was first announced, but quickly dropped it shortly before the first set of weekend games.

Harry, unexpectedly, gets a savage sort of satisfaction out of it. The thought that he might be thinking of Malfoy while Malfoy goes on with life as if nothing happened is somehow unbearable, but this proves something. Malfoy had gone out of his way to avoid Harry. He had been thinking of Harry.

*

Something settles into place after that. It’s easier, seeing Malfoy across the Great Hall. Easier, standing next to Malfoy in Advanced Potions. Hermione is growing quite worried, and Harry can swear he feels Malfoy’s eyes linger on him at times.

“Malfoy,” he says politely outside the Charms corridor one morning. Malfoy opens his mouth, a small tell, just his lower lip falling out of place slightly, and then he quickly snaps it shut and gives a small nod before going along his way. 

He had looked furious, Harry notes. The grin sliding across his face is smug, he knows it, he can’t help it.

Next to him, Hermione begins to fret.

“You’re sure everything’s alright, Harry?” she says, putting a well-meaning hand on his shoulder. In that moment, he knows that she knows. She’s probably known since the beginning, the way Hermione does.

“You don’t think it’s a good idea, do you?” he says to her, not that he’ll put much stock in her answer. He already knows what it’ll be anyway. She shakes her head.

“No, I don’t,” she admits. “But I’ve learned a long time ago that I can’t stop you from doing what you want.”

*

In Potions the next day, Harry asks Malfoy politely to pass the paring knife. Malfoy does so jerkily, spilling a bowl of dead wood lice over on its side in the process. Harry raises his eyebrows, but says nothing, taking care to touch no part of Malfoy’s skin when he takes the knife.

At the end of the class, Malfoy’s Angel’s Trumpet Draught looks a dismal, sticky navy rather than the smooth, watery cerulean it ought to have been. He looks like he wants to say something to Harry, beyond the simple two syllables that make up his last name, but Harry leaves the room with Ron and Hermione as soon as the bell rings.

*

Two weeks later, Malfoy joins a recreational Quidditch team. They play Harry’s team that very weekend.

Malfoy’s team is good, surprisingly good. Blaise Zabini, Millicent Bulstrode, plus Anthony Otterburn from Hufflepuff, Michael Corner and Terry Boot from Ravenclaw, and Fay Dunbar from Gryffindor.

The teams are just about dead even; Malfoy’s Chasers are a bit better, but Ron, having relaxed greatly at being a Keeper for just a recreational team, is doing superbly. Of course, it comes down to the Seekers. A crowd has gathered on the stands, and surprisingly, Harry cannot even tell who they are cheering for.

It feels fantastic, and Malfoy gives him a truly third year-worthy snarl from over his shoulder as they race each other to the Snitch. Harry just grins and stretches his arm out a little further. The both of them lose the Snitch in the next minute, but then Malfoy is bumping against Harry’s broom and along his side, deliberately, aggressively.

“Keep up, Potter,” he says, and there’s venom in his voice. Harry feels electric. 

_”Keep up, Potter,”_ he had said one time when their cocks had been pressed together and Harry, too lost in the heat and the feeling, and slackened his grip. The words were spoken hotly against the skin of Harry’s neck.

The Snitch reappears minutes later, and Harry does not catch it.

*

He lingers in the showers afterwards, feeling triumphant despite his team’s loss. Ron had looked at him very strangely when they left the pitch; Harry had never liked losing in Quidditch, and his high spirits in the face of their defeat hadn’t gone unnoticed.

But he’s alone now, and the water is blissfully hot. His glasses are on the ledge just below the shower head and he’s just about to shut the water off when the door to the shower section busts open.

“You little cheat,” Malfoy says. Harry looks over. Malfoy’s arms are crossed and he’s only wearing the trousers and jumper portion of the Quidditch gear. He looks thunderous.

“I didn’t cheat,” Harry says, swiping his hair away from his forehead.

“You didn’t catch the Snitch at the end. You hesitated.” Malfoy sounds extremely accusatory. Harry says nothing, just continues to let the water sluice down on him. He’s aware that he is very naked, but Malfoy, in all his anger, hasn’t looked down once.

“You _let_ me win,” Malfoy bites out, advancing forward with quick, efficient strides. He steps forward until he’s getting wet with shower water, still fully clothed. “You fucking _let_ me win. _Why_ did you do that?”

Harry doesn’t flinch or blink. He looks at Malfoy evenly and shrugs, as if he couldn’t care less. Of course this isn’t the case; his cock is going hard now, spurred on by Malfoy’s proximity, the look of fire behind those otherwise cold eyes. 

“You fucking _bastard_ ,” Malfoy says, shoving Harry back until he’s against the wall. Malfoy is fully under the shower spray now, still in his shoes, his silvery hair melting into gold with the moisture. His long eyelashes look dark and spiky with water.

“What does it matter to you?” Harry says levelly. “We aren’t anything to each other, remember? I don’t owe you anything.”

This makes Malfoy even angrier.

“Shut _up_ ,” he seethes, hands coming up to grip Harry by the hips so tightly it hurt. He slides down to his knees. “Shut _up_ ,” he repeats.

Harry just looks down, his hands at his sides, his cock jutting out below Malfoy’s chin.

“I thought it was just shagging,” he says as casually as he can manage, but it’s difficult in this position. It comes out strained, nearly hopeful.

“You know it wasn’t,” Draco murmurs, still managing to sound venomous behind the soft words. “It was never just shagging.” And then he sucks Harry’s cock into his mouth, just like that.

Harry had known this was going to happen. He had known it, and he revels in this as he slides his wet hands into Draco’s wet hair and comes, wetly, into Draco’s wet mouth. 

He could be cruel, he thinks, as he strokes Draco’s hair out of his face. He could push him away and say, “This was a mistake, you were right before. We shouldn’t do this.”

It’s true, after all. Draco’s eyes are defiant as they look up at him and Harry thinks he must be expecting a kind of humiliation like that. He had planned to do that, too.

Instead, he strips Draco down, his jumper and trousers making smacking sounds as they hit the tiled floor. He strips Draco down and crowds him against the shower wall and fingers him until he’s whining for it, loose and open.

“You knew,” Draco accuses when he’s panting above Harry. He says it stiltedly, punctuated with a gasp when Harry presses sharply inside of him. Harry hums and curls a hand around Draco’s cock. “You knew this would happen.”

“We can stop if you like,” he says against Draco’s jaw. Draco just shudders, and then he comes.

*

“I really think you ought to stop,” Hermione says in the common room one night. Ron has gone up to bed, and Harry knows Hermione has waited for this to happen before starting on him. “It’s a very bad idea.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Harry says, because he’s sure that Hermione’s too embarrassed say out loud the details of Harry and Draco fucking.

“I’m only trying to help,” Hermione says. “Please. What will people say when they find out?”

Harry frowns. What will people say when they find out? Does he care?

 _“I’m so fucking glad that you can_ afford _not to care,”_ a voice hisses in his mind.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” Harry says. It’s the first time he’s alluding out loud to anything that’s been going on. It’s also a lie. He thinks Hermione knows this too, by the way her eyes soften infinitesimally.

“Oh, Harry,” she says. “If only I believed you. But I hope whatever happens that you’ll be happy.”

*

“What do you want to do about this,” Harry says one evening after he and Malfoy are lying spent across the feather bed that the Room of Requirement provides for them so unfailingly.

“Take a nap and have another round,” Draco mumbles, rolling over on his side. His hair fans out over the pillow, cornsilk fine. Harry reaches over to run his fingers through it.

“I don’t mean now,” Harry says. He’s afraid of what he will say, of what Malfoy will say, but he continues on anyway. “I mean...you said this wasn’t just shagging.”

“I did say that,” Draco agrees. “You did too.”

“Yeah,” Harry says. “But,” he swallows, his throat dry, “what about….” He trails off. “I _care_ about—what happens. About you. I don’t want this to—” 

“Potter,” Draco says, rolling over and sitting up. The post-coital haze seems to have been lifted off of him. “Now that I’ve had you, I don’t think I can possibly let you go,” he says, articulating every word in his posh accent. He climbs up and straddles Harry’s lap, knees on either side of Harry’s thighs, and leans down over him. “We’ve tried that, and I don’t think either of us liked it.”

“No,” Harry whispers. “We didn’t.”

“We’ll just have to fuck so loud and so often that everyone will _have_ to know it then, won’t we,” Draco says, and Harry can tell this is his way of avoiding the subject. He lets him, however, and sighs into it when Draco kisses him.

*

“Harry,” Ron asks over breakfast one morning, “is something going on between you and Malfoy?”

Harry looks up, startled at first that Ron has picked up on something at last, but then he sees Hermione conspicuously duck down, intent on her porridge. He narrows his eyes at her, and she pretends not to notice.

“Er,” Harry says. “How do you mean?” He doesn’t want to lie anymore. He’s a terrible liar, anyway, even if Ron’s never been too good at telling.

“Well,” Ron says, shifting in his seat uncomfortably. He looks around, as if to make sure no one’s watching. “You two just seem kind of...I mean, if you’re wanting to make friends with him, that’s all right, you know...” He seems to be searching for the right words, and his face is growing redder by the second.

“I don’t quite follow...”

“Oh, honestly,” Hermione bursts out, clattering her spoon down noisily. “Harry, this is his way of telling you that he’s okay with it!”

“Okay with what?” Harry says, still clinging onto feigning ignorance.

“Us shagging, of course,” a voice says above him. Draco is standing there, and then he drops down into the seat next to Harry like it’s the most natural thing in the world.

Ron turns and interesting shade of purple and looks positively faint. “Merlin’s saggiest pants,” he says. “I didn’t want to believe it...but it’s really true, then? You’re shagging?”

Hermione looks self-satisfied. Harry looks at Draco who is appearing nonchalant, but under the table, has rested his hand on Harry’s thigh.

“We’re not shagging,” Harry says. Ron looks even more confused, and Draco smiles as well.

“No,” he agrees, “we’re not.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! ✩


End file.
